New York

The Fines and Fees Justice Center’s New York state campaign is the first sustained effort to reform harmful fines and fees practices statewide. Our goal is to abolish fees in the justice system and to ensure that fines are equitably imposed and enforced.

The fines and fees issue hurting the most New Yorkers is driver’s license suspension for Traffic Debt. Between January 2016 and April 2018, New York issued nearly 1.7 million driver’s license suspensions for Traffic Debt. Traffic Debt suspensions force an impossible choice: Stop driving and lose access to work, childcare, health care, food, and other basic necessities, or keep driving on a suspended license and risk criminal charges and more unaffordable fines and fees.

New Yorkers face this problem every day because they do not have enough money to pay traffic tickets. Because Black and Latinx people are disproportionately stopped, ticketed, charged and convicted, this cycle of debt and punishment especially burdens communities of color.

This map compares poverty and the rate of driver’s license suspensions lasting for at least one year. Click on the image to view our Story Maps.

Driven by Justice is a statewide coalition of grassroots, economic justice, and civil rights organizations, public defenders, and directly affected people working to end the unfair and discriminatory practice of suspending people’s driver’s licenses for nonpayment of traffic tickets in New York State. We use legislative advocacy, public education, and grassroots organizing to:

End driver’s license suspensions for nonpayment of traffic tickets and for not appearing at a traffic hearing;

Reinstate all driver’s licenses suspended for failure to pay or appear; and

Make affordable payment plans available.

The Fines and Fees Justice Center, together with the Bronx Defenders and the National Center for Law and Economic Justice, invite you to support the Driven by Justice Coalition:

We advocated for more NYC reforms. FFJC, alongside advocates from the Zero Profits Coalition, testified at a New York City Council hearing and urged the Council to end fees, created a new Office for Economic Justice, and pilot means-adjusted fees.

We demanded New York State make local government funding more fair. Tax caps drive cities across New York to rely more heavily on a far more regressive form of taxation: fines and fees. We testified and co-authored a New York Law Journal op-ed against Governor Cuomo’s property tax cap that limits local property tax increases to 2% per year.